I’ve already written a long post tracking the Amy Bishop story. As more details emerge, I’ll post them. Here are a couple of things worth noting.

The first isn’t about her, but about her university. Just last year, another UAH professor was convicted of murdering his wife.

As to Bishop: The Boston Globe reports:

The University of Alabama biology professor accused of slaying three of her colleagues fatally shot her brother in an apparent accident in Massachusetts more than two decades ago, a local police chief said.

Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed the 1986 shooting in his town and slated a news conference this afternoon to discuss the incident.

She was twenty, he eighteen. While trying to “unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun,” she shot her brother in the abdomen.

The Globe article comes close to suggesting it might not have been accidental.

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As details of Bishop’s earlier killing emerge, things get a bit stomach-churning:

The Braintree police chief said today the woman accused of gunning down three in an Alabama shooting rampage shot and killed her brother during an argument in 1986 – but no police report exists and she was never charged.

Chief Paul Frazier said Amy Bishop shot her brother in the chest, fled the house, pointed the shotgun at another car, then fled into woods.

Police found her and arrested her, but during the booking process the former police chief called and interceded, Frazier said. No investigation took place after that and the incident report was lost or discarded.

“This would never happen in this day and age,” Frazier said.

Frazier has forwarded the case to the Norfolk DA’s office for investigation…

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Another account:

She fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall, before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.

Before Bishop could be booked, the police chief back then told officers to release her to her mother, Frazier said.

Howard Jacobson, a British novelist, teaches at GW next semester. As he notes in The Independent, his arrival has been bumpy.

… I am in Washington being a visiting professor. Seemed like a nice gig when I was offered it, but that was before the snow fell. Let’s not be churlish: it still is a nice gig, or it will be if George Washington University ever reopens. The minute we landed, the city’s institutions began to close their doors. You’ve never seen so much snow. Lock yourself in your room and don’t come out is the advice on radio and television. Which is all very well if you’re in your own home and have a freezer stuffed with pizzas, but an apartment hotel with a complimentary sachet of coffee, two tea bags, and a packet of chocolate chip cookies – the difference between civilisation and barbarism is the difference between an English biscuit and an American cookie – is no place to be holed up in for a month.

… Trader Joe’s turns out to be the best grocery store with principles I have ever shopped in, and that isn’t just desperation talking. Yes, you can get your slivered seeds if you want them, but you can also get salamis soaked in red wine, puttanesca sauce made with red wine, excellent red wine vinegars, red wine mustard, and best of all, red wine itself, organised not only by country but by grape. Suddenly I don’t want the siege to end; God willing I won’t have to do an hour’s teaching and can sample every pinot noir the state of Oregon can produce before I fly back home again, assuming a thaw, in March…

[Please note: This is a big, quickly moving story. This post contains many updates.]

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UD reader David sends this to UD. It’s from the Associated Press, published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A woman opened fire during a biology faculty meeting at the University of Alabama’s Huntsville campus Friday, killing three people and injuring at least one more.

The shooter was in custody, but university spokesman Ray Garner said he could not identify her or the victims. Local television stations reported she is a faculty member.

Garner said three people were dead and a fourth injured. Trent Willis, chief of staff for Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, said several other people had been shot, but he did not have an exact number or their conditions…

The university’s home page.

Faculty member Amy Bishop is in custody. Her home page has been taken down.

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I’m passing this along, but I’m skeptical:

WAFF also is reporting that law enforcement sources say a female faculty member learned during a Biology faculty meeting that she would not receive tenure. She then pulled out a gun and started shooting.

Since when are you informed you’ve been turned down for tenure in a meeting, in front of the faculty? I have trouble believing any department is this nasty. It is, on the other hand, possible that she had, maybe this afternoon, received a letter or phone call telling her she’d been turned down… And after thinking about this for a while, she decided to pack a gun.

UPDATE: From a National Public Radio blog:

The accused shooter was denied tenure by the university Friday morning. According to the reporter, the woman then returned to a biology faculty meeting this afternoon and allegedly started shooting her colleagues.

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The blog Media Elites

provides this picture.

Taken into custody.

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Live local coverage.

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Her archived web page.

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UD‘s sister sends her this detail from Britain’s Daily Mail — not an impeccable source, so make of it what you will:

The neuro-scientist’s husband opened the door for his wife before she started shooting, according to local reports.

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Names of those shot, from the Huntsville Times:

G.K. Podila, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, all three faculty members at the university, died shortly after the afternoon shooting at the Shelby Center.

Joseph Leahy is in critical condition at Huntsville Hospital. Stephanie Monticello and Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera are now stable, officials said.

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Update, Saturday morning: If the details in this Daily News piece are correct, we can begin to suggest a few things about this event.

As one might imagine, there’s now evidence that the shooter was known to be unstable. The husband of one of the killed “said his wife had mentioned the shooter before, describing the woman as ‘not being able to deal with reality.'”

If he is also correct that his wife “was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of a faculty member who got angry,” then presumably this was a meeting to which Bishop had not been invited, because her tenure status was being discussed.

In which case, the detail from the Daily Mail (none of these details is yet confirmed) about Bishop’s husband (not a faculty member) opening the door for her before she began shooting suggests that she crashed the meeting — with his help.

It’s not clear whether Bishop had already been notified of denial of tenure, went into a rage, got her gun, burst into the meeting… Or whether this was the meeting during which faculty would discuss and vote on her tenure (but there were assistant professors there, so this seems unlikely), and she, knowing the likely outcome, attacked them before it could be reached.

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According to this NYT account, published an hour ago, she did not storm the room.

On Friday, Ms. Bishop presided over her regular class before going to a biology faculty meeting where she sat quietly for about 30 or 40 minutes, said one University of Alabama faculty member who had spoken to people that were in the room. Then, she pulled out a gun and began shooting, firing several rounds before her gun either jammed or ran out of bullets, the faculty member said.

… George Washington University Hatchet.

… Georgetown University v. George Washington University snowball fight, in the Georgetown Voice.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm would, though, like to correct the following:

Once GWU began to flood the hill Georgetown students were standing on, the snowball fight digressed rapidly for the Hoyas.

Fights do not digress. People digress when they leave or lose the main point they were making in an argument. The writer might have meant deteriorated… ?

And this is just one case among many. Instead of sending fraudsters and insider traders and extortionists etc. to jail, their lawyers increasingly argue, sentence them to lecture in business schools.

Can you see where my mind’s going on this? We’ve got an economic crisis in this country (and in Canada, where Professors-to-be Drabinsky and Gottlieb live), and our universities are way stressed out. We’ve also got an ever-growing cadre of sophisticated businesspeople suddenly faced with a prison-or-community-service dilemma.

Hire them! Hire them all! They know a lot, and many of them are colorful characters who’d make good lecturers. And they don’t cost anything.

Take Ezra Merkin. Why shouldn’t Yeshiva University take him back? He was a trustee there for years; now he can be a lecturer.

Austerity measure bonus: Yeshiva probably still has stationery with his name on it.

Business school professors are expensive. If there were, say, a lottery system in which universities could bid on an active list of HAAs (House Arrest Adjuncts), some universities might be able to suspend their regular faculty altogether.

Yeah well. I just liked the word.

Okay, here’s the rest of Roethke’s The Far Field. I’m going to mess it up with my comments, but you’ll find it nice and neat here.

Scroll down to the previous post for part one of Snow Poems.

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II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,

[We’re done with the dream in section one. Now the poet recollects his rural youth, and the way encounters with dead animals taught him not about death, but about the eternal. This seems paradoxical.]

Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, –
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

[Marvelous detail, marvelous assonance (learned/eternal; among/rubble.]

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:

[A child of visceral responses, the poet mourned the deaths of the animals he saw; yet the spectacle of the natural world coming back to vibrant life in the spring made him euphoric. He easily forgot the scenes he’s described of death and rot.]

How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, –
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, –
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

[Ever-renewed natural life is a form of eternity; it asserts itself endlessly against the pressure of all that death.]

– Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,

[The poet turns his memories this way and that. Now he thinks of lying once on a sandy riverbank considering a shell.]

Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;

[What was I in a previous life? A previous incarnation? Maybe an inanimate object, or maybe a person, but one not so strange as I.]

Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

[Previous lives; and also afterlives. This is the eternity about which nature has taught the poet.]

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

[The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow. Tomorrow’s white light is the snowy pall from the dream in section one. We’re back in the car, I think… And not just not fearing infinity, but, as the dream suggests, being drawn again and again toward it, toward the far field at the end of the peninsula, and then toward the oncoming water after the peninsula.]

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III

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;

[From the description of a recurrent dream, to a set of memories of the natural world, to the present. Section three is set now, with the mature poet describing a strange temporal/spiritual experience he’s undergoing. The experience in a sense mirrors the experience of his dream: Both experiences have a dual nature: They are both physical narrowings – the world converging in on itself, things getting smaller and darker – and temporal advancements, quickenings, implying the impending end of the poet’s life.]

Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, —
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, —

[Again, an experience akin to the convergence of different waterways as they meet and plummet to the plain, becalmed.]

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;

[I too, in my many-streamed complexity, have arrived at a becalmed place, outside the rush of daily reality.]

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,

[Earlier, the poet wrote I watched and watched til my eyes blurred. He was talking about birds; now he stares at another manifestation of bejeweled nature: iridescent sandgrains. In the perpetual glory of nature the rapt poet finds his religion.]

My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

[The dead animals renewed him, made him not fear infinity; and he repeats the idea here, with two beautiful images of near-death: the September garden and the faint red ash of a weak fire. A lover of the earth, the poet finds transcendent bliss near at hand.]

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IV

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, —
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.

[Again he revisits the initial death-dream. Dying, what used to be you drives toward the sea, toward the infinite. Your robes are green – the dress of nature – as you return to nature, converge with it, narrow into it.]

A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.

[Death concentrates the mind wonderfully. Thoughts of death – and allied thoughts of the oddness of our having been born at all – empty the comforting phenomenal world and make us naked – without psychological defenses.]

His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

[In death your spirit converges with nature.]

All finite things reveal infinitude:

[In those dead animals the child saw the immensity, saw the infinite life of the earth.]

The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;

[The September garden, the faint red in the ash; and now the after-light — the after-life — created after the pines have been coffined in ice; and a certain shade paradoxically, at singular moments, bright; and also the pale snow vividly blue… The poem brims with images of unexpected, supplemental vivacity, with evidence of a sort of permanent imprint made on the world by virtue of each particular person having been here. The rest of the poem will list this poet’s particularities, his memories, his imprints.]

Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, —
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

[The tree is sunken; the self has died. But the tree’s sunkenness creates the silence of the water above it, lends the water the mysterious beauty of its placidity. One man’s consciousness, having lived, having gathered memories, survives him, ripples out from his singular mind to all the waters of the world. Frozen his body may be, in the car that drove to the end of earthly life; but his spirit continues into the water beyond the land, part of ever-regenerating nature.]

Cream of crab soup
Salt and pepper calimari
How I survived The Blizzard of 2010

Yes, I could offer many haiku detailing UD‘s snowed-in week here at the Legacy Hotel in ‘thesda (She was just interviewed by the George Washington University newspaper, The Hatchet, which is doing a feature on “stranded professors.”), but I think I’ll stop with one, and turn instead to the consideration of a very fine poem about snow, Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field. It’s a bit long, so let’s take it section by section.

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I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

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The initial stanza tells us we’ve got a lyric poem, autobiographical — I, I dream. The poet describes a recurrent dream of his in which he drives alone in the snow, no other traffic, himself carrying nothing of his life (without luggage) out to the end of a long peninsula; and when he gets to the point at which he can drive no further, he sits in his car while its stalled engine churns until everything shuts down — the headlights darken.

Such a dream, recurrent, seems suicidal, the poet drawn to an eerie narrative of a more and more narrowing world in which his mind – headlights – finally stalls and shuts off. Snow is all over this dream as the pall of coffined earth, covering the dying poet more and more as he moves forward.

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II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, —
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, —
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, —
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

— Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

***********************************

Wait – I’ll post what I have so far. What with all the interruptions (along with the Hatchet reporter, La Kid called wanting to talk about Pride and Prejudice, and Mr UD called), I haven’t been able to concentrate on the poem’s second section.

I think Mr UD misses me. He said: “You are like Formula One racing. Maybe not so great for one’s longevity, but very exciting.”

Remember her? Harvard undergrad who published a chick-lit novel at 19?

UD, who’s been around forever, blogged about her back in 2006.

Everyone got all excited about this woman until much of her novel turned out to have been plagiarized.

Now 17-year-old Helena Hegemann also turns out to have cut and pasted her amazing, scandalous, about-to-be-prize-winning novel.

No one ever seems surprised by these slews of Francoise Sagans. No one thinks it odd that people just learning to insert tampons can pen tomes of astounding maturity and darkness.

Just like BHL (Europe’s hoax-quotient is certainly high lately), Hegemann’s brazening it out, lecturing us on the difference between originality and authenticity, etc., etc.

She’ll be fine. Unlike Gerald Posner, she doesn’t work for a magazine that can fire her. She’s an independent agent. Plus, the whole point of Hegemann is what a bad girl she is. Plagiarism can only help.

I’m watching a fifty mile an hour white-out from my hotel room window. There are virtually no cars on the road – only emergency trucks. The power company has stopped sending crews until the blizzard’s over.

But the Legacy Hotel, UD‘s new home, is warm and powered-up and still has room service.

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UD thanks her sister for the picture.

… with years of insider trading in front of him. Carrying on the family tradition of thievery while working toward his MBA at NYU, his life was shattered when the SEC got wind of what he, his father, and his brothers were doing, and put them all in jail. At the tender age of 26, Ayal Rosenthal had to go to prison.

NYU decided to revoke his degree onaccounta they didn’t want to be known as the school that made Ayal Rosenthal what he is today.

Rosenthal is suing the university. He wants his degree back.

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It’s an interesting moral question. Should you be denied an education merely because you’re a precocious criminal? Universities don’t typically revoke the degrees of people who commit crimes after they’ve graduated. Do you think Wharton will revoke Rajiv Goel’s degree? Scads of insider traders and associated miscreants graduated from Harvard. Have you heard about any of them getting their degrees revoked?

Just because this guy was so smart he broke the law before he graduated, he has to suffer?

SEXUAL SATISFACTION IS A COMPLEX PROCESS
THAT VEXES MANY WOMEN AND THEIR DOCTORS

Headline, Washington Post

… as the Captain and Tenille sing. Once is never enough… whoaaa…

Same thing when it comes to plagiarism, as you know if you read University Diaries, because she never stops telling you. Plagiarized articles are like roaches. Find one, and ten others will come scurrying out of the plagiarist’s past.

So it ever was, so it shall be … and so it is, Dear Reader, with Gerald Posner.

Last week, a reader tipped me to an instance of potential plagiarism by Gerald Posner in the Daily Beast, for which Posner is chief investigative reporter. After I called the plagiarism to the attention of Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal, the site deleted five pilfered sentences and added an editor’s note to explain the deletions and to apologize.

… But this isn’t the only example of Posner pinching copy without attribution. Slate reader Gregory Gelembuik and I have uncovered additional examples of plagiarism by Posner in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald article, and a health care journalism blog…

Jack Shafer at Slate has done what Jolisa Gracewood did with Witi Ihimaera’s work — he has simply Googled.

Posner has been suspended.

Leading French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy has been caught red-faced for praising the work of a philosopher who, it turns out, was invented as a joke by a journalist from a satirical daily.

In his latest book “De la guerre en philosophie” (Making war in philosophy), Levy quoted Jean-Baptiste Botul, an expert on German philosopher Immanuel Kant created by journalist Frederic Pages.

Levy acknowledged late Monday that he had often quoted Botul’s work “The sex life of Immanuel Kant” during many public appearances and in the pages of his latest book…

Didn’t look twice at a book titled Sex Life of Kant?

Charles Bremner, in the Times, elaborates:

In his latest book, published this week amid the traditional adulation in the media, Lévy, 61, attacks Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher. He calls him “raving mad” and cites as his authority Jean-Baptiste Botul, a 20th century philosopher.

The trouble is that Botul never existed. He was invented as an elaborate joke in 1999 by Frédéric Pagès, a literary journalist, who wrote works in his name. One was titled “The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.” His school, known as Botulism, subscribes to his theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” [The metaphysics of the limp].

In “De la Guerre en Philosophie” [On war in philosophy], his new book, Lévy writes that Botul had proved once and for all “just after the second world war, in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay, that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance.” …

The Neo-Kantians of Paraguay? Isn’t that an emo band?